Rigging when bones must achieve conflicting goals
To be able to 'ease out' of an action strip that's higher up the stack and back onto a lower strip's:


Ensure the higher strip's Extrapolation values (found in the properties bar) are set to Nothing.
Play with the Blend out fields (also in properties bar) to phase out of the Action strip's influence.  You can get a visual sense of how much easing is occurring by looking at the descending slope on the right part of the action strip (circled in picture).